daemon

An unattended operation mode that continues a software campaign by starting follow-up sessions from saved progress.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for overnight or multi-session campaigns that need continuous progress.
Why use it?
It lets long-running work continue across context limits without someone manually restarting each session, while stopping at completion or a budget limit.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sethgammon/citadel/daemon
Any agent
npx skills add SethGammon/Citadel --skill daemon
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SethGammon/Citadel

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 69 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,135 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00069 $0.04135
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.02067
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00827
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00413

Measured yesterday against content hash 65c227b7dfdc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

daemon scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/daemon/SKILL.md · 268 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 268 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/daemon -- Continuous Autonomous Operation

Architecture, daemon.json field reference, and rationale: docs/DAEMON.md.

Orientation

Use when: running campaigns overnight or unattended -- chains sessions automatically until a ceiling or budget is hit. Don't use when: a single autonomous session is enough (use /archon); you want manual control between cycles (use /loop).

Default execution path (READ FIRST)

/daemon start does NOT call RemoteTrigger by default. The local runner is the default. Only pass --remote to use Anthropic's routine system, and only after explicit user confirmation.

Why: RemoteTrigger counts against the account-wide 15 routine runs / 24h cap. A single overnight run can exhaust the quota and pause every other routine on the account (including unrelated ones). See docs/ROUTINE-QUOTA.md.

Default flow — /daemon start (no --remote flag)

  1. Do Steps 1, 2, and 4 below (validate, check existing, write daemon.json).
  2. Skip Step 3 — do NOT create any RemoteTrigger. Leave chainTriggerId and watchdogTriggerId as null in the state file.
  3. Instead of Step 5's trigger-confirmation, output the local-runner instructions (full text: docs/DAEMON.md#local-runner-default): the state file path, campaign, and budget, then:
    To start the tick loop, run in a separate terminal:
      npm run daemon:local
    
    Leave that terminal open. It spawns `claude -p "/do continue"` each
    session, respects daemon.json status, and consumes zero Anthropic
    routine quota. Stop with Ctrl+C or `/daemon stop`.
    
    For true unattended background operation (machine sleeps, user away):
      /daemon start --remote    (uses RemoteTrigger, counts against 15/day cap)
    

Codex automation lane

In Codex, prefer a Codex Automation for durable unattended daemon ticks when available: node scripts/codex-automation.js plan --type daemon --command "/daemon tick" --cadence "<interval>" --target background-worktree --write. Use the returned prompt in the Codex app automation surface. Each run must still read and update .planning/daemon.json; Codex owns the scheduling, Citadel owns the budget/status gates and run log.

Read the full file on GitHub · 268 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 268 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A 65c227b7dfdc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

daemon is a skill published in the GitHub repository SethGammon/Citadel (912 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 4,135 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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